But Gundred had great skill in ignoring all unwelcome topics; it was very rarely that she remembered her cousin, and all the dim, remote unpleasantnesses that Isabel represented. Her first year of married life now loomed down upon her out of the distant past as a confused nightmare-mirage of desert wanderings, from which her nice tact and the favour of Heaven had brought her feet at last out into the Canaan of prosperity, conjugal and social. The few brief sorrows of the past assumed gigantic proportions in the haze of memory, and Isabel was their incarnation. Gundred began to realise how directly Heaven had intervened to relieve her of her cousin’s threatening presence, and, though grateful for the service, it was to her credit that she retained humanity enough to think the means adopted unnecessarily drastic. This tenderness greatly elevated Gundred in her own eyes. She remonstrated with Heaven--not acrimoniously, indeed, but with feeling, and devoted many prayers to Isabel’s happiness in another world. But she rejoiced over Isabel’s removal from this, and nothing could have given her serenity a greater shock than any suspicion that her husband ever remembered the dead woman with tenderness or longing. However, she was protected from such perceptions as much by her own impermeability to unwelcome truths as by her husband’s perpetual skill. He had not come so far through life, safeguarding his wife’s happiness and trying to behave decently, only to undo all the good by allowing her now to see that he regretted Isabel. The course of years had taught him to keep a shut mouth on all his aspirations. His mind was apparently thrown wide for Gundred, but Isabel’s shrine was hidden in the very holiest of holies. As Gundred roamed through his mind’s reception-rooms, comfortable and clean and neatly decorated, she never had any suspicion of that locked room in the very heart of his soul’s dwelling, where the memory of Isabel was for ever worshipped. Many of us, indeed, there are that keep a secret shrine, but few of us suspect its existence in anyone else’s life. Gundred was perfectly happy in her monopoly of her husband, perfectly confident that she knew every corner of his mind. He, for his part, gave thanks for the salutary blindness which so often makes life tolerable, and continued to make his wife a visitor in the heart whose tenant was still the dead woman--the dead woman whom he daily expected to meet again, whom every hour brought nearer to the renewal of contact with himself. He had done his duty, played his part, abundantly paid Gundred all he owed and could; affection, respect, loyalty--of all these he had never failed for one moment to give her in good measure; the secret impulses of his love could not be controlled like their formal manifestations; no one could exact it; not one could expect it. His own inmost heart still yearned and cried for the return of Isabel, that return in which every day made